Fascinating remark

A reader writes:

No catechism’s logical words can ever make me a Catholic. No doctrine can ever make me a Catholic. But the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary CAN, in ways beyond logic.

There’s something going on there that I find deeply interesting. Apologetics types may well take offense. So, surely, will Protestants of a more Calvinist hue, for whom the impulse to reduce the Faith to a series of diagrams and “propositional truths” is unusually strong.

But for another sort of person, I think this statement makes instant and intuitive sense.

To be sure, I don’t perceive the disconnect this reader seems to see between the Faith as it is reflected in the Church’s philosophy and theology and the Faith as it is reflected in Mary, Seat of Wisdom. I think the two are inseparable and that it is a mistake to introduce a false opposition between them where there is, in fact, harmony.

But precisely *because* there is harmony between Our Lady and the teaching of the Church, I also have no grudge against somebody who comes to the Church via her rather than via a rationalist parsing of diagrams, doctrine, dogmas, and “propositional truths”. Just because somebody is left cold by apologetics arguments that excite a small subculture of people in the Church does not mean they have no living relationship with God or even that they necessarily “dissent” from the Church’s teaching. It could just as well mean that God built them different and that they are recieving on a wavelength I’m not listening on. It takes all kinds to make a church Catholic.

I can’t help but wonder at the million hidden ways God works through our Lady to reach hearts where no logic-chopping argument can go.